The lure of the profitable van market has burned once high-flying start-ups like Arrival, but the chance to disrupt the old guard by means of electrification is still pulling in new players, who are eyeing up the 'last-mile' market in particular.
The latest to jump in is storied engineering company Prodrive, which has formed Elm Mobility with UK design company Astheimer to put the Elm Evolv small electric van into production from 2028.
'Last-mile' is defined as the final stage in the delivery process from a logistics hub to your door. Because this is predominantly urban, it opens up the market to a huge range of vehicles, from cargo bikes to full-size vans, depending on the bulkiness of what needs to be delivered. Linking them all is the need to go electric, as both city and national legislation push operators to become zero-emission.
Elm Mobility reckons it has found an unserved middle ground between the two extremes of costly, over-large vans and low-protection, low-payload cargo bikes.
The 3.2m-long, single-seat Evolv will be built under the L7e quadricycle regulations and has a planned range of 100 miles. Weight is just 850kg with batteries, but it can carry 500kg in two roomy load areas.
“The market isn’t very well served. Operators are either misusing diesel or small electric vans or using these sort of golf-cart-derived small vehicles, which aren’t fit for purpose, ” Iain Roche, CEO, Prodrive Advanced Technology, told Autocar at the vehicle’s official unveil at the Cenex LCV show held on Wednesday at Millbrook.
Elm’s target price of £25,000 puts the Evolv in a different strata to the enclosed versions of electric cargo bikes, which cost around £15,000, but below small vans such as the Renault Kangoo E-Tech, which is pushing £35,000 (all prices are ex-VAT).
The danger for Elm is that electric last-mile is probably the most unpredictable vehicle market on the planet.
Kia, for example, is holding back on developing its smallest last-mile PV1 van, shown as a concept in January along with a range of larger electric vans scheduled for launch starting next year.
“That’s still under evaluation,” Pierre-Martin Bos, Kia's PBV director for Europe, told Autocar in July. “There's been a lot of concentration on the last-mile delivery. In fact, everybody now speaks about last-mile delivery, but it's only 20% of the [van] business.”
Elm is banking on the main players not paying much attention. “The volumes are a little bit too small for the big manufacturers,” said Roche. “But for the small start-ups, it's a little bit too big. Customers need the quality and sophistication that you only get from work of a larger brand.”
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